The Pain of High School

Only the most cruel and hard-hearted—people
who no longer remember the pain of high school—would want to arrest and
prosecute a 15-year-old black girl who reported being racially harassed
at West Bend East High School.

But
since right-wing talk shows thrive on fanning the flames of racial
division, they were out-shouting each other last week, demanding that a
racially isolated and unhappy young girl be criminally charged and even
incarcerated for her complaints. The West Bend Police
Department and Washington County district attorney were only too happy
to pile on.

West Bend police arrested the girl at her home after the
police chief said a department investigation found no evidence to
support the girl’s complaints that she was racially harassed in school.
And the Washington County district attorney charged the girl with
obstructing an officer, alleging that she lied to investigating
officers. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of 90 days
in jail.

How does the personal misery of a vulnerable 15-year-old
high-school girl escalate into a criminal case and spark inflamed
rhetoric on right-wing radio? We have begun criminalizing childhood.
It’s the result of schools abandoning their responsibility to address
conflicts among students within their own buildings. Problems that once
were addressed by a trip to the principal’s office now are routinely
transferred to the criminal justice system.

The girl’s family
moved to West Bend this year from Milwaukee. A new student in a
predominantly white school, the girl told school officials she was
repeatedly the target of racial slurs and physical jostling in the
hallways, including being pushed down a stairway. Once, she said, eggs
were dropped on her in a stairwell.

School officials
reportedly had the girl followed in the hallways and said they did not
witness any misbehavior toward her. Police said they reviewed tapes
from surveillance cameras in the school and did not see anything to
confirm what she said, including the alleged egging.

West Bend
Police Chief Ken Meuler claimed that his officers spent “hundreds of
hours” on the investigation, which sounds like a schoolchild’s
exaggeration itself. Of course, who knows how many hours the West Bend
C.S.I. unit spent scraping for traces of egg DNA in that stairwell?

Teachable Moments

Let’s put the truth of the girl’s specific allegations aside if we can, just for a moment.

Let’s
talk about a few things we all know to be true from our own highschool
experiences. It can be one of the most emotional and painful times in
our lives. Everything is amplified and exaggerated: our loves, our
heartbreaks, our exhilaration, our despair.

At an age when
every slight is magnified, real cruelty and bullying also can be some
of the most vicious we will ever experience. At the time in
life when everything is still possible, many young people can’t imagine
ever getting over the emotional torment of the moment. At its most
extreme, it has led to teenage suicide and even mass murder.

Now
imagine at that painful age a young African-American girl transferred
into a predominantly white world where she has no friends.

It
is possible the girl may have exaggerated or even fabricated some of
the incidents she described in order to get out of a lonely, racially
isolated school situation where she was deeply unhappy.

It’s
just as possible she is telling the truth as she sees it. No one is
naive enough to believe it’s completely outside the realm of
possibility that some students in a predominantly white school might do
things to make an African- American outsider feel uncomfortable.

What’s
obvious is that schools should deal with complaints of racial conflict
among students in far more positive ways than just calling the cops.
Conflicts between students require intervention by psychologists,
counselors and other social workers trained in mediation and
communication.

Most police officers are probably a lot more
comfortable asserting control over a violent crime scene than they are
communicating with children. Besides, in a state that arrests and
incarcerates a greater percentage of its African Americans than any
other state in the union, sending in the police shouldn’t be the first
option to deal with sensitive racial issues in our schools.

A
whole lot of cruel and unacceptable behavior takes place in schools
without ever being brought to the attention of authorities so that
problems can be resolved as teachable moments with positive outcomes.

So
how likely is it for another African American to ever again complain
about racial treatment in West Bend after a young girl who does so is
arrested and prosecuted? When your only tool is a hammer, every problem
looks like a nail. An emotionally distraught 15-year-old girl in West
Bend just felt the hammer come down.